Ideas, thoughts, and other unrelated paraphenalia

Blogging

A big thank you to all those who have supported this blog during its first hectic but exciting year. There’s lots more to come, so I hope you can stick around and keep sending in all those great comments. Have a wonderful 2011!

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 2,200 times in 2010. That’s about 5 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 41 new posts, not bad for the first year! There were 38 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 5mb. That’s about 3 pictures per month.

There’s some horrific statistic out there about how many CCTV cameras there are covering city streets in the UK . When George Orwell wrote his immortal words, “Big Brother is watching,” this was exactly what he was referring to – no, not the TV series. And yet, the overwhelming majority of people in the UK are just fine with their actions being watched – and recorded – all the time. Their attitude is, it’s only people who are doing something wrong that would have a problem with it. (We’ll talk about state secrecy another day.)

There was always something amazingly exciting about receiving a letter, peeling it open and reading the hand-written words inside. Especially if the letter had come from overseas, dressed in a crinkly dark blue envelope, with an array of exotic stamps crowding the top right corner, sometimes so overburdened with validations it was impossible to guess where it had come from, or when. The letter opened a tiny window into other places, other lives, the minds of people who had chosen to sit and write their thoughts down on paper. Once there, they remained forever, separate from their author and yet still joined by an invisible thread.

There is no substitute for that experience today. Electronic media has changed it forever, but here I hope to rekindle the idea of it. To throw down thoughts and ideas, questions and perhaps once in a while, the odd answer. I hope you find something here to enjoy or prod you to thought. Feel free to join in and throw something back into the debate. I love a good discussion.

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